The I Bike MCR 2009 D.I.Y Grassroots Festival takes place from Friday 27th March to Friday 24th April 2009 and as part of it we are holding our annual Bike Polo Tournament.

Teams are welcome from everywhere and the prizes are gonna be great. It will be so great for teams from around the UK and further afield to get together and meet each other, and to play in a city other than London!

If you are from out of town please let us know if you want us to find you a place to stay and how many nights you’ll be staying.

London bicycle polo: It ain’t for the genteel set
By Miles Johnson
Wed Oct 29, 2008

LONDON (Reuters Life!) – In car parks and concrete football pitches across London, cyclists of all stripes have transformed a badge of the British establishment into their own brand of extreme urban sport.

Bicycle polo replaces the horse with the two-wheeled bike for a mount, grassy pitches for hard asphalt and the elegance of a sport enjoyed by royalty and the rich into a gritty urban pastime for anyone with nerve enough to join the madcap melee.

Out are the riding helmets, gentlemanly attire and finely groomed steeds. In are fixed wheel bikes, gladiatorial-style chanting and a healthy dose of physical contact as two teams of three use improvised mallets to smash a small plastic ball between goals made out of traffic cones.

There is no referee and few fixed rules apart from players suffering a “time out” penalty if their feet leave their pedals and touch the ground. The first team to reach five goals wins.

“It’s like the new football (soccer),” joked 22-year old Max Knight as a fellow player with a waxed mustache and manic look in his eye whizzed past, celebrating a goal by roaring and thumping a mallet made from a golf club and packaging foam into the ground.

“You get people from loads of different places coming down to play all the time. First it was the bike couriers, but now it’s becoming more fashionable and they’re being replaced by students, designers, even lawyers.”

The first bicycle polo matches however were more tranquil affairs, played in the late 19th century by British colonial police in India who used bikes to practice their polo skills when horses weren’t available.

Bike polo once even featured as an exhibition sport in the 1908 Olympic games. But after reaching the height of its popularity in Europe the 1930s it fell into decline after World War Two, only to be resurrected by the cycle-courier communities of North America and Europe in the 1980s.
Now it appears to be in a healthier state than ever. Playing in an all-London league four times a week, players also compete in tournaments that attract teams from across Europe.

Star teams include Zombie RMY, who are one-time London champions.

“It’s definitely had a resurgence in recent years as more people are riding bikes in general” said John Hudson, a dispatch courier and the organizer of the annual Brick Lane bike polo tournament.

“The best thing is that there are no one set of fixed rules. We have players coming from Munich, Paris and New York who all have a different style of play. There is also a certain amount of physicality. You know, I’m not manhandling you, I’m just steering you into the wall”

Some players perform the equivalent of step-overs in football, letting the ball pass between their wheels at speed to avoid being tackled, while others shoulder barge their opponents or block them with their bike frames.

“My favorite is the elbow on the shoulder, where you grab them and can steer where they’re gonna go,” said Knight, who added that injuries have mounted, including one player who split his skull open on a particularly nasty play.

“It was all right in the end though. He was back playing again in no time.”

If you thought summer in London’s parks was all about football and cricket, think again. It may sound like a game created by students after seven pints of cider, but bicycle polo is about to take off.

It first hit the London scene in 1895 and in 1908 it even featured in the capital’s Olympic Games line-up. Today it is played from Canada to Â­India via Clapham Common and perhaps not unsurprisingly, Chelsea. “It’s not all about Cartier and being toffy nosed though,” declares Tim Dobson, captain of the Chelsea Pedallers, the team at the centre of London’s bicycle polo revival.

“We get a complete mix of people to our matches. Gandhi called it the common man’s game because Â­everyone had a bike.”

Teams can field as few as two players and as many as eight. Each is armed with a wooden mallet to hit the ball on a football pitch with a goal at each end. With each match split into four chukkas of 15 minutes, the idea is to bash, dribble and volley the ball into the goal.

“It’s such a good fun game,” says Dobson. “And it’s safe because we use a soft ball. It’s also quite demanding physically.” He pauses. “But having said that, we usually play for an hour and then sit in the pub for three.”

There are officially three variations of bicycle polo with slightly different rules, plus a more maverick element with the sort of disregard for regulations that would send the pony polo set into convulsions. In January a match of “Punk Polo” was held on Clapham Common’s netball courts.

The two rules – to hold mallets in right hands only and not to let feet touch the ground – existed as much for creating order as for Â­allowing players to demonstrate their great skidding technique.

The same group – from Oxford, where the bicycle polo scene is thriving – is organising another tournament on 8 July to coincide with the launch of the Tour de France. Add to this the fact that London’s bike Â­couriers frequently join up for matches and teams with names like the Axles of Evil compete, and suddenly you’ve got the perfect anti-Â­establishment sport.

Of course, if you’re remotely interested in learning traditional polo, then this is also a great and cheap way to start. Royals, including Zara Phillips and princes William and Harry, have been known to have a bash, while other enthusiasts turn to their bikes on weekends for Â­training practice.

So don that fake Rolex with pride, crack open that bottle of cava and prepare to say goodbye to your spokes. Bicycle polo is coming to a park near you.